MIAMI, Florida (April 7, 2002) - The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD)
rallied in dramatic fashion to take the final game of the final match and
win the “Final Four” of intercollegiate chess for the second year in a row
Sunday, solidifying the UTD players’ standing as the “best college chess
team in the United States.”

UTD and its arch-rival, The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC),
each finished the competition with nine game points, but UTD took home the
President’s Cup emblematic of college chess supremacy by beating UMBC, 2 ½
to 1 ½, in their head-to-head competition in the final round and winning
all three of its matches during the two-day tournament, which was held at
the World Chess Hall of Fame and Sidney Samole Museum in Miami, Fla.

Stanford finished third with 5 ½ points, and Harvard was last with only
½ point.

“I am extremely proud of what our team accomplished here this weekend
and what it has done in the past 16 months,” said Dr. Tim Redman,
professor of literary studies who serves as director of UTD’s chess
program. “Dethroning UMBC as the reigning king of the college chess world
was no easy feat. UMBC was the best for a long, long time and is still by
far our toughest challenge - as this tournament demonstrated. This was as
close as it gets.”

UTD went into Sunday’s match trailing UMBC by a full
point because the margin of its victories on Saturday over Stanford and
Harvard were slightly less than those of UMBC. UTD beat Harvard, 3 ½ t o½,
and Stanford, 3-1. UMBC defeated Harvard, 4-0, and Stanford, 3 ½ to ½.
That point still separated the two chess powerhouses going into the final
game Sunday afternoon -- between UTD’s Andrei Zaremba of Michigan and
UMBC’s William Morrison of New York.

As part of a strategy worked out several weeks ago by Redman,
International Master Rade Milovanovic, the UTD coach, and Grandmaster Yuri
Shulman, the UTD team captain, Zaremba traded queens with Morrison on only
the fifth move of the game, moving their contest immediately into a very
early end-game, as Redman explained it, “because we thought - it turns out
correctly -- that Zaremba had a better end-game.”

The strategy worked, and the 19-year-old Zaremba - methodically, but
inexorably -- emerged victorious in a game that lasted nearly six hours.
His win gave UTD, which in 2001 was named “Chess College of the Year” by
the U.S. Chess Federation, its second consecutive Final Four championship
-- by the thinnest of possible margins.

UTD first served notice that it might be poised to nudge
UMBC from the pinnacle of college chess in December of 2000, when, in
Milwaukee, it tied the top-ranked team for first place in the Pan American
Intercollegiate Team Chess Championship, usually considered the top
college chess tournament held in the Western Hemisphere. Then last April
in Dallas, UTD bested UMBC, Stanford and the University of California,
Berkeley, in the inaugural Final Four of Chess competition.

The rivalry continued: last December in Providence, R.I., UTD and UMBC
again tied for first place in the Pan Am tournament, defeating the likes
of Harvard, Stanford, MIT, U.C. Berkeley and the University of Chicago.
And then this weekend, UTD again bested UMBC in the Final Four tournament.

UMBC dominated college chess during the latter half of the 1990’s and
has finished first, or tied for first, in five of the past six Pan Am
tournaments.

The winning UTD team in Miami was composed of Shulman (Belarus), Marcin
Kaminski (Poland), Zaremba (Michigan) and Andrew Whatley (Alabama). David
John (Texas) served as first alternate and Dennis Rylander (Sweden) as
second alternate.

UTD, which has no football team, ranks among the top universities in
the country in computer science graduates and has strong programs in many
other areas including engineering, audiology, space sciences,
nanotechnology and sickle cell disease research.

Redman and UTD President Dr. Franklyn G. Jenifer both have said they
view chess as a symbol of academic excellence and intellectual rigor.

About UTD

The University of Texas at Dallas, located at the
convergence of Richardson, Plano and Dallas in the heart of the complex of
major multinational technology corporations known as the Telecom Corridor,
enrolls more than 7,000 undergraduate and 5,000 graduate students. The
school’s freshman class traditionally stands at the forefront of Texas
state universities in terms of average SAT scores. The university offers a
broad assortment of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs. For
additional information about UTD, please visit the university’s web site
at www.utdallas.edu.